Thirteen consecutive weekends poured unrelenting rain over Mark Wilson and Mari Princiotta’s 11 acres in Tilton last spring, each torrent flushing down their sloped property and swamping their vegetable fields.
The deluges had nowhere to go. Earlier this month, the couple learned from a soil health professional with the Natural Resources Conservation Service that the water table under their land sits just 20 inches beneath the surface.
Although that revelation demystified their vulnerability to flooding, Wilson and Princiotta will continue to fight — as they have for years — to wrest control over their farm from the grip of erratic weather events and the whims of an increasingly unstable climate.
They’ve waged their battle in trenches, like infantrymen on the Western Front of World War I. They’ve pitted insects against one another, luring “beneficials,” their foot soldiers, with pollinator gardens to help fend off the undesirable infestations that arise from excess moisture.
And with a recently drilled well, they’ve managed to emancipate their operation, Marimark Farms, from town water entirely, affording them a greater degree of agency.
“We came from knowing basically nothing about farming. We just had kind of a vision like, ‘How hard could be?’ Well, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Princiotta, said seated at her kitchen table, eyes framed behind deep cyan glasses. “There are so many great resources in New Hampshire that have helped us figure it out. But our problems are big. Bugs, weeds, weather. Weather, weather, weather.”
Farms have always been susceptible to Mother Nature’s whims, but climate change has intensified that volatility. Data collected at U.S. Historical Climatology Network meteorological stations in Keene, Durham and Hanover indicate that the average annual maximum temperatures in southern New Hampshire have risen between 1.1 and 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. Annual precipitation is expected to increase between 17% and 20% by the end of the century, according to a 2014 report by the University of New Hampshire’s Sustainability Institute. Warming winters could extend the growing season and allow farmers to cultivate new crops, but that’s a thin silver lining.
Recent weather patterns illustrate the contrast. The final week of June battered central New Hampshire with rain, then the first week of July scorched the region with blistering heat, temperatures approaching triple digits on July 2.
The major challenge for growers in these conditions becomes managing moisture — drawing water reliably in times of scarcity, draining water efficiently in times of glut, and finding the money and technical training to build the infrastructure to support those aims.
“Hot humid periods like we’re having now, if it were to go on for a longer period of time? Last year, we barely had any raspberries that were marketable because it was just so hot,” said Luke Mahoney, owner of Brookford Farm in Canterbury, where protecting soil health has been a first line of defense in building climate resilience. “We’re also learning how to grow better. Part of it is us and part of it’s the climate.”
Crop rotations with immediate turnarounds to perennial cover crops, such as blueberry bushes, help to mitigate flooding and minimize detrimental exposure of soil to the elements. As a diversified farm with a 240-head herd of cattle, Brookford worries about its animals’ well-being in harsh weather, too, choosing to keep cows cool under a portable structure called a Shade Haven.
The question remains: Will these small acts of ingenuity be more than the sum of their parts? Will they be enough?
“There’s going to be some years where we can’t really overcome all the pressures that exist on the farm in order to bring it to a fruitful end,” Mahoney said.
Beating the heat
The southern Sahara desert receives 5 inches of precipitation, on average, every year, the region’s dry tropical climate delivering rain mainly in thunderstorms. Even more meager are the northern Sahara’s rains: annually, an average of just 3 inches.
When Ron Christie began growing in New Hampshire, where arid barrenness seems a faraway notion, an ancient irrigation system used in desert environments struck him as the answer to future-proofing his farm in view of what he prefers to call climate volatility.
Shaded on the deck of his home in Concord — with farm dog Radar, a 2-year-old rat terrier, chasing circles around him — Christie explained the rationale underpinning the stacks of plastic boxes and spools of braided nylon rope sitting a few feet away in his driveway. He proselytizes the good and energy-efficient news of wick irrigation with the enraptured fervor of a true believer.
“If you have a leaf way up over here, what happens? It dries out, and then it says, ‘All right, I need more water,’ so the roots respond by moving water from an area that has a lot of water, usually soil, up into the plant,” he said. “By using a wick, what you’re doing is you’re providing water that seeps from a wet area to a dry area through capillary action.
“We have temperatures coming up almost 100 degrees in a couple days from now, and the plant would be fine, because guess what? There was enough water coming out of the rope.”
Christie grows cherries, apples and peaches at Off the Wall Orchard, and his chosen method of irrigation is far from the only unconventional approach he takes to farming. He grows all his trees under netting to prevent pest-borne disease, and he elevates pruning to an art form, preferring a red-handled pruner and black rubber bands to tame his apple trees. Shaped like pitchforks, they are what’s called multi-leader trees, with several rawboned trunks growing vertically and in narrow aisles to maximize exposure to sunlight, as if flattened to form a wall.
Three hundred trees currently comprise the orchard, and Christie is about one-third of the way through implementing wick irrigation to water each one, a project financed in part by a climate resilience grant from the New Hampshire Conservation Districts.
By the end of the summer, he hopes every tree’s roots will be connected by ropes, encased in rubber-hose shells, to its own bucket of water, creating a fully-autonomous, on-demand system where the trees can draw as much or as little water as they need.
Wick irrigation is labor-intensive to implement and funny to look at on account of its resemblance to plumbing or the human intestinal system. But for a small-scale operation scrapping to eliminate the question of water waste when drought conditions set in, it works.
The only power needed, Christie likes to say, is to pump water from the well to the bucket, and even that could be accomplished with a hand pump, a leg bicycle or whatever Rube Goldberg contraption floats your fancy.
“I have a lot of thoughts. Nine out of 10 of them, or 99 out of 100, are really stupid, and I try them and they don’t work. I am a failure farmer; I try a lot of things. Most of the things I try don’t work. A couple of them do, and when they work, they work beautifully. And wick irrigation is a perfect example of something that works really, really, really well,” Christie said.
Like Christie, Wilson and Princiotta received a climate resilience grant from the New Hampshire Conservation Districts to implement an efficient irrigation system, which for them meant drilling a well. The project totaled almost double the grant amount, $10,000, but it has already brought down their water bill and quelled their fear that, in times of drought, when towns regularly impose water-use restrictions, they could go without one of farming’s most crucial inputs.
An inconspicuous metal wellhead protruding from a sheet of grass is virtually the only visible trace of this advancement, the well’s pump and pressure tank shielded in a barn. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s crucial to what we’re doing,” Princiotta said.
From there, water trickles through a scrupulous system to avoid overuse: Moisture sensors connected to an app on Wilson’s phone give him a reading of the needs of the leafy greens growing in his high tunnel. Drip tape, hoses laid in rows against the soil, feeds droplets of water through small interspersed holes directly to the root system of each plant, a highly efficient irrigation system Wilson manages with pulse timers.
In case of extreme heat or drought, the couple can keep just enough water flowing to their crops. But sooner or later, the pendulum is guaranteed to swing back in the other direction.
When it rains, it pours
The process of drilling a water well required, in Wilson and Princiotta’s case, digging a trench 6 feet deep to accommodate the pipe that would carry water from the well to wherever it was needed.
As Wilson dug the trench, the sky would open up and fill it with rain. On two separate occasions, he had to rent pumps to drain the water so he could continue to work. Last week, patches of standing water still pooled in various locations across their field despite three days of dry weather.
“As these rain events have increased, we started having all kinds of moisture issues. The [high] tunnel started flooding and the property got saturated, and it has basically been saturated since 2018,” Wilson said.
A different kind of trench, buried 2 feet in the ground, wrapped in plastic and surrounded by porous gravel, runs along the side of a high tunnel to capture water and drain it into the wooded band separating their property from the Buffalo Park Conservation Area.
The trench drain spans 200 feet, but “it’s not sufficient for what’s happening on the property,” Wilson said. He and Princiotta plan to build a second trench drain, this one 75 feet long and slicing diagonally across the field, and to outfit their barn with new gutters. They’ve begun growing tomatoes under a caterpillar tunnel, a barebones greenhouse that provides a physical barrier against precipitation.
Gaining ground on rain and extreme heat, both unforgiving and ruinous, is a battle advanced in increments and measured in years.
“There’s nothing more disappointing than going down to the field and seeing that the cucumber beetles have taken out all of your squash plants — they’ll just die, wilt overnight — or that the rain basically has destroyed your field tomatoes,” Princiotta said. “It is frustrating because you can’t change the weather. What we’re doing is trying to compensate for what’s going on and control it a little bit.”
